Here at TNT Lab, we anchor our approach to narrative transformation in a concept we call “story grammar.”
To understand what story grammar is and why it is so useful requires a little background.
By Solon Simmons
The narrative change sector has become a large and growing area of both practical and scholarly interest. As much interest in the area as there has been, the science behind the approach has not always been clear.
It is not too strong to say that all narrative approaches in the social sciences and humanities (and by extension in the private and public sector) emerge in the context of what was called “structuralism” in the study of linguistics in the early twentieth century, especially the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.
This area is notoriously complex, but the basic idea is that social life was understood in terms of the model of language—something larger than the individual that was nevertheless used by individuals to coordinate activities among themselves. Just as each language had a structure, so too was society imagined as if it also had a structure whose rules could be discovered and utilized.
As alluring as the concept of a social structure has been over the decades since Saussure taught his famous course, both his model of social structure and others that had different points of departure, as in the study of social mobility, came up against the same problem. There is something inherently incomplete and unstable about any given structure that we can point to, something that eludes the model itself and points in directions that are not patterned by it.
This gave rise to a host of enduring critiques of structuralism by scholars such as Jaques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu that remain compelling to this day. Therefore the great monuments of structural theory in both anthropology and sociology fell into something like an antiquarian status, leaving those who studied the structural features of social life—a set of discoverable rules through which to explain social events—in a quandary: Social life is clearly patterned, but perhaps we are not capable of ever discovering what those patterns might be.
Once the post-structuralist critique had taken hold by the mid-1960s, it soon spread, and few people today now aspire to discover the structural rules of social life.
But structuralism didn’t die; it just went to Hollywood. The idea of a coherent “shape of the story” was too compelling to just let go, especially when there was money to be made on the subject.
Going back to the writings of Vladimir Propp and his formalizer Algirdas Greimas, it was clear that there were elements of storytelling that fit tightly together, and practical writers had been looking for ways to formalize the uses of these elements in the formulation of literary craft in playwriting and literary theory. All of these models drew on Aristotle’s generative book, The Poetics, and updated those ideas to fit within the literary context of the twentieth century.
Everything changed when a professional Hollywood screenwriter, Syd Field, took these ideas about the rules for telling a good story and wrote them down in his book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. Pair that with the fact that George Lucas used Jospeh Campbell’s ideas about the hero’s journey from the study of religion and folklore to craft to a new American myth in Star Wars, and the structural analysis of story lost its academic posture—but gained the world.
Understand that building the screenplay is different from writing the screenplay. They are two different processes.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
Since then, dozens of books on story structure have been written, and a whole lore exists that provides aspiring writers with formulas for how to write and make their fortunes, compelling lecture series for Hollywood professionals, and sophisticated and newly updated books that tie story structure to popular formats in streaming services and television.
Story structure is real enough to keep our attention. At least, it is real in that sense.
But the shadow of those post-structuralist critiques remains. Can we ever specify a structure that ties all the parts of the whole together in a way that doesn’t merely reflect our own biases, our patriarchy, our Euro-supremacism, our favored forms of political economy?
If there is hope, and we think there is, it requires a shift in metaphor. Instead of “story structure,” we prefer to refer to “story grammar,” much like Roland Barthes suggested we do in his famous essay from 1966, when the very notion of structuralism remained an open question.
And it is evident that discourse itself (as a set of sentences) is organized and that, through this organization, it can be seen as the message of another language, one operating at a higher level that the language of the linguists. Discourse has its units, its rules, its ‘grammar’: beyond the sentence, and though consisting solely of sentences, it must naturally form the object of a second linguistics.
Roland Barthes “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”
This grammar beyond the sentence that structuralist thinkers had been contemplating at least since Roman Jakobsen’s writing on structural linguistics points to the kind of structure that a story structure would have to be.
Much like sentence grammar provides us with a set of rules for using words to put together meaningful sentences, so a story grammar would provide us with a set of rules for using sentences (or other signifying systems like images) to put together meaningful stories. That is, meaning would derive from the way the text itself was put together.
This is precisely the level at which we at TNT Lab enter the conversation. We believe that there are rules like those that apply in sentence construction that can help you to tell a better story. These rules are littered through the literature of literary criticism and can be codified or modeled to provide actors in the narrative change sector with practical tools much like those that have revolutionized the Hollywood screenwriting profession.
What has been missing is the courage to break with Claude Levi Strauss, to separate the concept of coherent and clear story grammar from the dream of a coherent and clear mythic structure.
Just because we appear to be wired to respond to certain kinds of literary moves (just as we appeared to be wired to think of the world in terms of subjects, objects, and verbs), does not mean that all of us share a clear sense of the way those elements hold together and refer to the real world. Story structure can be clear and distinct even if the world of sense and reference remains a blooming, buzzing confusion.
Literary talent—the creative conversion of ordinary language into a higher, more expressive form, vividly describing the world and capturing it human voices. … story talent—the creative conversion of life itself to a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. … Literary and story talent are not only distinctively different but are unrelated, for stories do not need to be written to be told.
Robert Mckee, Story
We believe that there are ways to specify aspects or elements of story grammar that can be extremely useful to practitioners, even if their ontological status remains somewhere beyond our reach.
There was quote that the famous statistician George Box had on the door of his office at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1990s. It read, “All models are wrong. Some are useful.”
The models of story grammar you find here are proposed in Box’s pragmatic spirit.
We identify elements and frameworks of story grammar that are meant to be useful, even though we known that they are in some sense wrong. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that our epistemology was bounded by the language games we play. Our goal is to help you play your language game better, to tell your story and change the world.
to cite this article
Simmons, Solon. “Story Grammar.” The Narrative Transformation Lab. https://tntlab.carterschool.gmu.edu/learn/narrative-transformation-guides/story-grammar/.
